The guys at Hexus set out to see exactly what kind of performance you get when you remove the dongle (CrossFire) or the bridge (SLi) & let the cards in a multi-GPU setup communicate simply over the PCIe bus.

"Bridgeless and dongle-less multi-GPU rendering isn't exactly new. We've seen it on lower-end SLI and CrossFire solutions, but now it's starting to rear its head higher up the product ranges, where the lack of a dedicated inter-card link might have a bigger impact."